


What Happened To The Tiktik Girl?

by Jwash



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Life on Nilt, Other, Tourism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 15:57:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21273818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jwash/pseuds/Jwash
Summary: In a city on Nilt, someone wakes up from an odd dream.





	What Happened To The Tiktik Girl?

The shuttle's jetwash stirred the snow and threw up curlicues of powder as it landed, its back hatch opening with a loud hiss. The sound startled the bov around it, sending them lowing and farting across the tundra as two off-worlders descended the rear ramp, both dressed like villains in a Radch-drama. Their red jackets glittered with a constellation of jewellery in the moonlight, and their hands were hidden in delicate snow-white gloves. One loomed out of the night like a crow, with a narrow face and sharp features while the other strutted out, stockier and well-built. She thought they both looked familiar.

"Good evening,” said the short one, with a deep, gravelly voice.

She recognised that voice. She shivered, even though it wasn’t cold (_that doesn’t make sense_, she thought).

  
  
“You are the true heir to Anaander Miaanai,” the stocky one went on. “We have come to fetch you, to return order to the Radch. All glory will be yours.”

  
  
No, hang on, they weren’t like that at all. She tried to remember what they’d been like, and realised that she’d woken herself up. She opened her eyes and surfaced through sleep into a dark room. Her curtains were still closed and only streetlight peeked around the edges. She rolled to one side, and her clock told her it was only an hour or so before dawn, and maybe two hours before she had to be at work.

  
  
She sighed. Why dream about two weirdos who’d turned up that year her uncle’s leg got bitten off? The junkie couple with funny looks and odd manners that fell off the bridge, then disappeared afterwards and were forgotten in the mess of family members coming in to fill her uncle’s boots. She hadn’t thought about them in years. Maybe it had been the Radchaai she’d had on her tour the other day had jogged her memory, but they’d been distant, oddly polite, and besides she’d had Radchaai on her tours before and they hadn’t sparked any sudden reminisces.

  
  
She rolled over, wrapping her thick quilt around her, trying to fall back asleep, but anxiety squatted in her stomach. She could feel her heart beating too heavily in her chest. She sat up on the edge of her bed, still wrapped up, and sighed.

  
  
It had been years since then. She’d grown up and gone south like all the other farm kids from up north who went to live in cities like this, where they’d found each other and gotten rooms in places like this building (i.e., with dodgy glazing and thin interior walls), and had gone to work on the bridges. The local seignority department had opened their bridges to tours in an effort to compete with cities further south, those more hospitable, nearer the ribbon, and with more scenic bridges, and had attracted a slightly hardier breed of tourist, ones who prided themselves on going off the beaten track and seeking out the "real Nilt". People like her came in and provided tours for them, acting like "real Nilters" who knew every in and out of each local bridge, even if they really came from some far tundra farm and knew nothing more than the two page script.

It paid enough for her and the other guides to live here, to go to the same bars and see the same singers, which was... _fine_, she knew it was fine. She was being independent, moving away from home, from her _legions_ of relations, but sometimes she couldn't help but think of her childhood. Of that old life, of the occasional weird interludes in the pastoralist tedium of her childhood, like the time her uncle's leg got bitten off, or the time the bov had gotten in the porch, or the first time her mum had let her drive the flier...

She sighed and stood up, still wrapped in her duvet, and walked over to the communicator. She dialed her home number, memorised since she'd been able to say "number". The tone rang once or twice before she heard her mum on the other end, the line fuzzy with static. The weather report had forecast a late Spring blizzard, and she could hear it on the line. She imagined her mum dressed in her thick layers of wool and fur, already awake this early to let the bov out.

"Yeah, mum? It's me. No, no reason, I just realised it's been a while since we spoke..."


End file.
